


Officially

by chicleeblair



Category: Brady Bunch
Genre: Adoption, Divorce, F/M, Gen, Past Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:15:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28139028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chicleeblair/pseuds/chicleeblair
Summary: This group must somehow form a family….
Relationships: mike brady/carol brady
Comments: 7
Kudos: 23
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Officially

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GMTH](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GMTH/gifts).



> So, this is maybe a little less “fun with the kids” and more “really watching this as an adult I have continuity questions,” but I hope you enjoy it! I really loved writing it, and revisiting a show that probably qualifies as my first or second fandom (I had the Episode Guide and everything.)

The meeting with Cindy’s teacher started it all.Carol and Mike Brady weren’t surprised to be summoned to Dixie Canyon Elementary by Mrs. Engstrom. Her difficulties adapting to kindergarten the previous year had been the reason they didn’t switch her to the neighborhood school Bobby and Peter attended. She’d been a little distressed to be going without Jan, who’d asked to go ahead and make the switch with a level of relief that confirmed Carol’s worries that her difficulties with many sudden changes in the girls’ lives were social, not scholastic. She would have to go to Clinton Elementary next year, since Carol’s parents had downsized and wouldn’t be able to keep her enrolled using their address, but they hoped there would be enough stability to balance it out.

The one time Cindy questioned being singled outresponded, “Sweetheart, don’t you want to stay in the same class as your friends for a little while longer?”

“Yes,” Cindy said, quickly enough that the lisp Carol secretly loved was even more pronounced than usual. “Well…. All of them except Mary Ditmeyer!”

Carol had chastised her, but not very fiercely. To be honest, she’d be fine with never having to chaperone a field trip with Eustace Ditmeyer again.

Mike arrived at the school first, and after stopping by the playground to check on Cindy, headed inside. The little girl was thrilled to have the extra playtime, without the concerns an older child would have about Mommy and Daddy being summoned to talk to her teacher.

Finding the classroom didn’t take him long, and he found the teacher sitting at her desk running a pen down the columns of a grade-book. He rapped his knuckles against the doorframe, and she must’ve heard him coming, because she lowered her reading glasses before smiling up at him.

“Hello, you must be Mr Martin.”

He glanced up at the number over the door. 1A, sure enough. “Uh. I’m Cindy’s dad.”

“Mike! You got here early.” Carol’s voice rang out from behind him. He stepped out of the doorway to give her room to lean up and kiss his cheek. “Hello, Ms. Engstrom. It’s nice to see you.”

She wrapped her arm around Mike’s and led him into the classroom, past the rows of desks. It struck him that Ms. Engstrom spent her day with twenty children the size of Bobby and Cindy. His head spun sometimes with six, and that was with half over ten. It stood to reason she was a little confused.

“Ms. Brady, of course,” the teacher said, shaking Carol’s hand.

“This is my husband, Mike Brady,” Carol continued.

“Oh.” Mrs. Engstrom’s bright smile dulled a little. “I thought…. Well, Cindy wouldn’t be the only one of my boys and girls whose mother had a different surname.”

From the way she said it, Mike got the sense that she didn’t quite approve of those situations.

“Mike and I married this summer,” Carol explained. Her cheery demeanor didn’t falter, but she squeezed Mike’s arm in a way that told him she, too, wondered how much Mrs. Engelstrom listened to her students. He knew she’d brought in their family photo at least once to show her friends her “new daddy and brothers.”

The confusion more or less slipped from his mind once he and Carol were sitting in chairs from the arts and crafts table; his knees nearly touching his shoulders as they went over one of Cindy’s writing assignments.

Between the three of them, Mike, Carol, and Alice had noticed the amount of malformed letters in the little girl’s homework, so Carol and Mike were prepared for the content of the meeting. Mrs. Engelstrom tiptoed around the possibility that there might be an underlying issue by making every other sentence a reassurance that every child had these “little setbacks” occasionally, and chances were that with some undivided attention Cindy would be “back on track.”

“Do you think we don’t give her enough attention?” Carol asked that evening after she’d marked Cindy’s school play on the calendar, since the other thing Mrs. Engelstrom had hinted at was that she was one of the keener students, and likely to earn a significant enough part that they’d be loading up the station wagon and heading across town.

“No.” Mike kissed her temple. When he lifted his lips from her skin, Carol turned around to face him.

“You’re distracted.”

“No! Yes. Sort of.” She arced her eyebrows down at him, and heexplained the thought he’d been bouncing around since he understood Mrs. Engelstrom’s mistake.

An hour later, they were in bed, and Carol put her hand behind her head, staring up at the ceiling. “They’ll have questions,” she said.

“Sweetheart,” Mike said, taking her hand between both of his. “This might be the one time we absolutely have the answers.”

***

Late that night, shouts from the boys’ room sent them both into the hall. Greg met them at the door, his hair shoved up into a cowl-lick, but his eyes clear enough that Carol knew he hadn’t been sleeping.

“Pete’s having a nightmare,” he said, his eyes going back and forth between the two of them. “Bobby’s wakin’ him up, but you know how he gets.”

She didn’t know, but Mike nodded, clapping his son on the shoulder on his way into the room. Carol moved to follow him, and Greg touched her arm as she passed.

“He dreams…, Mom, you know he was in the car?”

She couldn’t tell from his voice if he was addressing her as _Mom_ or if he meant Peter dreamt about _Mom_. Either option fit.

“Mommy!” Peter cried out. Carol followed Greg into the dark of the room, where Mike stood at the side of the bunkbed, his arm around his son. Bobby was sitting on his knees by the ladder, holding a balled-up washrag in his hands. It had the feeling of a scene that’d been enacted many times before.

Carol had gotten most of her details about Mike’s first wife from Alice. It wasn’t that Mike wasn’t forthcoming; he’d answered anytime she’d asked questions, but it brought so much dark sadness to his bright blue eyes. One of the things he had ventured to tell her was that as horrible as losing her had been—and what little Alice would say about the months, and years, afterward confirmed this—that he felt lucky that he hadn’t lost his boys, too. Greg had been with him, at a Little League game, and baby Bobby at home with Alice. Peter had been the one with his mother, on the way to cheer on his brother.

“Hey, buddy,” Mike whispered. Carol heard a hint of teary huskiness. “You’re okay. I gotcha. Daddy’s got you.”

Carol stayed on the far side of the ladder, feeling very out of place, until Bobby reached for her hand. His fingers were damp from the cloth. She held them firmly.

“Mommy,” Peter said again. Mike had gotten him upright, and his eyes were open, if foggy. Over Mike’s shoulder, his eyes found Carol’s, and they widened a little. With one arm still draped over his father’s shoulder, he leaned forward, the other reaching for her.

She moved slowly, not wanting to startle him and pulled herself up the first two rungs of the ladder, putting herself within reach.

Mike caught Peter’s lower half to keep him from putting all his weight on Carol, and clung to her as his father dealt with the technicalities of getting them both on the ground.

“Mommy,” he murmured, his tear-sticky face against her neck. “You were there, too.”

While Mike oversaw the other two returning to bed and ducked in to check on the girls, she carried their son to his parents’ room to see out the rest of the night.

***

Really, in Jan’s opinion, the strangest thing about it all was seeing Alice in her day-to-day clothes. Oh, it wasn’t like she never had, which Marcia would probably point out if she mentioned it, but most of the time it was when she left for her day off.

She’d asked her mom if she minded having Alice call her “Mrs. Brady” once when she was being driven to school after a spilled glass of orange juice led to her missing the bus.

“It’s a little formal, especially because she lived here before I did,” her mom had admitted, “But she’s also been in service quite some time. There were probably certain rules about how she fit into the household. All I can do is tell her she’s free to call me Carol.”

“I guess.” Jan had said, watching a park pass by the window. It wasn’t _her_ park; the one she could remember running around after Marcia, while Marcia still liked running. If she really thought, she could remember her dad—her old-dad, if Mike were her new-dad like Cindy always said—pushing her on the swings there.

Maybe.

It could’ve been Grandpa.

“Do you never think about the old Mrs. Brady?”

“Late.”

“I know we’re late. I said I’m sorry.”

“No, sweetheart. When someone has passed away, you say they’re late. So, Mike’s first wife would be the late Mrs. Brady.”

“I see.” She didn’t, quite. If someone had come first, how could they be late.

“To answer your question, Alice has never made me feel like I come second. But she came to work for Mike after….”

“After his wife ran late?”

They pulled up in front of the school, and Jan had to run out before her mom could answer.

That wasn’t very long ago, but it kind of felt that way. So much happened in a family of eight, nine-plus-Alice, that she could sometimes hardly believe how short a time it had been since they all moved in together. They’d lived with Grandma and Grandpa Tyler a _much_ longer time, but that didn’t quite feel real sometimes.

“Jan, sweetheart, let’s go!”

Jan snapped out of her thoughts. “Sorry, Dad.”

“Not a problem,” he said, holding his hand out to her. “Let’s hurry and catch the others.”

She took his hand and they ran together to the steps of the courthouse, but she hesitated again once they were through the doors, and inside an incredibly elegant-seeming lobby. Her siblings were already climbing the marble staircase in front of them; Bobby and Cindy racing each other, while Mom hovered behind to make sure Cindy didn’t rip her tights.

“You all right, sweetheart?”

“I—I…. Um….”

He crouched down in front of her. “Hey, it’s okay. Take a couple deep breaths and tell me what you’re thinking.”

“It’s only…. When you talked to us about this, you said it’s like a marriage, right?”

“More or less. Yes, in that it puts something on paper in a way that makes it official in the eyes of the government, but it’s something that’s already true.”

“Oh, I know that.”

He laughed. “Good. Are you afraid of the judge’s questions? All you have to do is tell him that truth. I love you, and I’m going to take care of you.”

“But…”

“Jan, come on!” Marcia called from over the bannister on the next floor up. The way her voice echoed made Jan feel even smaller than she already did.

“We’ll be right there, Marcia! Don’t worry, sweetie. We have plenty of time.”

“Marriage isn’t forever,” Jan said, once her sister’s head had disappeared down a hallway she couldn’t see. “Not always. And you could decide you don’t want us. That’s how come you can be our dad, even though Mom’s a divorcey. Our old-dad had to sign a paper saying it.”

“Divorcée. How did you…. Never mind.”

He brought one knee down, like he had the day they all went to the zoo, and then he gave Mom the ring that Marcia said made them _enfianced_. Instead of holding out a jewelry box, though, he put his hands on her shoulders.

“Husbands and wives don’t stay together forever, that’s true. You never marry someone expecting it to happen, but you also don’t stop changing because you’re an adult. So, sometimes you discover that you’ve both changed so much that you can’t agree on things anymore. Important things, like where you want to live, or the values you want your children to have. Most of the time, you have a lot of problems for a long time before that happens. That means you don’t have to worry if your mom and I disagree sometimes, all right?”

She nodded, wondering how she knew that she _did_ worry. Every time.

“Everyone has their reasons for making the choices they do. Usually, you can understand them, even if you don’t like them. But letting you girls go? Not wanting to see you learn new things, and grow up, and one day, a very long time from now, be a grandpa to your children? That’s something I can’t understand.”

“But… What if I change as I grow up?”

“You do not miss a tri—a thing, do you?” He smiled, an honest smile that made her smile back. “All I can say is that the love a parent has for a child is very different than the love between spouses. There’s probably something scientific to it, about being needed by someone, and how that’s not the same as being someone’s partner. I don’t need to always agree with you, or like what you do. As you get bigger, I might not, always. That’s part of becoming a separate person from your mom and dad.

“What I will do, and what I’m going to promise to do up there today, is to be your dad. And to me that means that I will teach, and protect, and love you, and your sisters.”

“As long as we both’ll live?” she asked, remembering that part of the wedding ceremony, because it’d made her think of the boy’s late mom, and also made her kind of sad.

He laughed. “Longer.Love doesn’t go away because someone dies. It changes. The way you love me and your mom will change. But I will love you forever, I promise you that right now, Jan Elizabeth Martin.”

“Brady,” she corrected.

“Jan Elizabeth Brady.”

Jan threw her arms around her dad’s neck—not her new dad, just her dad, whatever anyone said—and then they went up the stairs, where her mom was waiting for them to take their seats with everyone else.

When they came down again, they’d be a family.

Officially.


End file.
